


Habits

by GiveMeABreak80



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Alternate Universe - K/DA (League of Legends), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:28:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27926755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GiveMeABreak80/pseuds/GiveMeABreak80
Summary: Past habits catch up to Akali, but thankfully her friends are there to pick her up if she falls.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 77





	Habits

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't seen enough of these fics for the K/DA fandom so I made one!  
> Please read the tags if you haven't already - this does contain a method of self-harm and several others mentioned.
> 
> (Also I didn't *really* proofread this so let me know if there are any mistakes)
> 
> With that being said, be nice to yourselves and enjoy!

“Akali.” A voice snaps Akali back to the present.  
“Huh?” She whips her head up to see all three of them staring at her. Eve, Kai’sa, and Ahri.  
“You’re shaking,” Eve says, face unreadable behind mirrored sunglasses.  
Akali looks down at herself to see her leg bouncing at a feverish rate and her entire body shivering. “Oh, hah,” she tries to play it off, “sorry. Too much energy.”  
Eve’s still except for her eyebrows raising.  
“It happens,” Akali speaks up, indignant, “you know me.”  
Ahri talks next. “You don’t shake, though.”  
Akali hums, they’re correct but she doesn’t want to say. She crosses her legs in uncharacteristically stereotypically-feminine movement and shrugs. “Sorry.”  
Truth is, Akali doesn’t know why she’s shaking, though she does have an inkling it may be linked to her inability to sleep soundly and prolonged time spent looking in the mirror, frowning.  
But Akali doesn’t want to worry her friends with something that doesn’t even have a name yet, so she turns back to the meal she was pushing around her plate and takes a bite.  
“‘Kali, you don’t have to hide from us, you know,” Kai’sa says.  
The rogue pouts as best she can with food in her mouth.  
Kai’sa continues. “We can help, or listen at least.”  
She chases her food with a gulp of water and pushes her chair back from the table. “Thank you for dinner-“ Akali points behind her with a thumb, “-gotta finish some stuff up.”  
The urge to turn around and face the three sets of eyes trained on her back is strong, but she manages to make it to the stairs and up around the corner without giving in. Akali is stiff until she closes the door to her room, then she starts shaking again.  
It’s more than pent up energy. She knows what that feels like, the need to move, to run. For gods sakes, she lived in a Dojo, random bouts of exercise to work off extra energy wasn’t new to her. But this is different.  
Akali doesn’t long for a simple use of energy - though that’s not far off - she wants pain. She wants to hurt.  
In the past she’d worked out in the Dojo until her entire body gave out, as she got older she would start fights out in the street to come home with bloody knuckles and a busted lip, but since she joined K/DA it became a lot harder to get that energy out, to get what she needed. So she turned inside, occasionally starting fights with brick walls and knives.  
It wasn’t pretty - it never was - but neither was she and it had to be done. Akali had lived with turning confusing feelings into physical pain for so long she doesn’t know how do to it any other way.  
“Fuck,” she hisses, letting her head thump forward against her door. How long until one of them comes up and wants to talk? But they know her by now, they’ll probably wait until she talks to them.  
Shit. Worrying about this is not what Akali needs right now.  
She needs pain.  
Her eyes dance across her room and lock onto the glint of a blade. No. She’s been clean for too long, she can’t do that. If it ends up at that, she’ll cross the bridge when she gets to it, but Akali would rather try something else first.  
She absently drums her fingers on her legs as she ponders her next step. She wants to get out of the house while she still can, so she’ll go to her hideout. Climbing out of the window to get out seems like the best option for that.  
Fine.  
Akali grabs a knife and shoves it in her thigh holster just in case, she leaves her phone behind on purpose but grabs a hair tie between her teeth before hopping out of her window. A quiet landing roll ensures they won’t know she’s gone right away, then she slinks off into the street with barely a backward glance.  
After ten minutes of jogging, she arrives at her favourite abandoned shop at the edges of their city. It’s been broken down for ages now, with shattered glass windows and a gaping maw where the door should be.  
Akali gingerly steps in and looks around. Her eyes adjust to the darkness fast enough, and she sighs in relief. Everything is how she left it.  
Not that Akali left anything there, but the absence of anything new is good. It means no one else cares for her spot.  
The rogue shakes out her body with a sigh, still feeling the itching need in her bones.  
She flicks her knife out of the holster and throws it into a crack in the bricks without much of a thought. No relief. She’ll have to do something more.  
A bolt of anger jolts through her spine at her weakness. She needs to hurt herself to feel ok again, how pitiful is that? Akali’s vision shifts red and she lets out a yell.  
Her palm slams into the brick beside her knife. The thump hurts. It’s good.  
She pries the knife out and stabs the bricks again with a roar. The screech of metal against brick is horrible, and it’s definitely damaging her knife, but she doesn’t care.  
Again.  
Not enough hurt.  
She throws the blade to the floor and brings her fist to the brick.  
It was a lot harder than she intended to, and fiery pain shoots straight up her arm. “FUCK,” she screams into the empty room, and forces her other fist to do the same thing.  
It hurts.  
Warm liquid bubbles up between a couple of knuckles, and she grimaces, then does it again.  
Not as hard, Akali can’t make her body willingly do that, but it’s hard enough on her already bruising hand.  
Again.  
Again.  
Again.  
She drags her fists down the wall, opening up fiery red scratches with a pained gasp.  
Akali bites her lips and only has to tap the wall with closed fists before tears prick at her eyes.  
She headbutts the wall.  
Shit.  
It’s not enough to leave a mark but it hurts.  
Akali falls backward onto bare concrete and lets out a frustrated yell.  
Now that the initial adrenaline has worn off, she can feel the pain more. It fucking hurts. She knows nothing is broken, but it’s definitely bruised and bleeding.  
Bleeding for sure.  
The dark red, almost black liquid in the low light is mesmerizing to watch.  
She flexes her hands and immediately regrets it with the fresh wave of pain it brings.  
Akali does it again.  
More blood spills from the cracks, dripping onto the floor.  
She hasn’t done this is so long now. She has ran and yelled and thrown knives, but she hasn’t hurt herself to the point of bleeding in a while.  
The rogue misses it; the painful bliss.  
She slumps back to lie fully on the cold floor and lets out a shaky breath. With amusement, Akali realizes she’s not shaking anymore.  
Just bleeding.  
She groans, figuring it’s probably time to head back if she’s worked it off already.  
But Akali lies there for almost an hour, lost in thought and barely in her own body. Good thing the pain in her hands anchor her to the present, or her mind might sweep her away.  
She loses herself in the moon through the broken roof, aimlessly tracing the craters she thinks are there. It stops her mind from wandering too much.  
Finally, Akali finds the will to sit up.  
She blinks the dizziness away and stumbles up onto her feet.  
Oh fuck, the girls are probably worried sick. She doesn’t know how long she’s been gone, but it’s definitely been a while.  
Akali grabs her knife from the floor with a hiss of pain before shuffling out the door.  
It takes her twenty minutes to get back home.  
By the looks of it, they’re all in bed with only Ahri’s bedroom light on, but Akali assumes she’s working on lyrics or contracts or something boring.  
She wants to climb up into her room, but just thinking about it makes her hands ache, so she approaches the front door warily.  
The door is silent as Akali creeps in, carefully shutting it behind her. She eases her shoes off and pads halfway through their main living space before-  
“Akali.”  
She yelps and turns to the couch, seeing a figure faced away from her. It turns and the golden eyes of Evelynn are stark against the inky blackness of their living room.  
Akali inches her hands behind her back and tries to fake a smile, never mind the fact all of the girls always see through her facade.  
“I’m going to help you,” is all Eve says as she makes her way to the kitchen to flick the lights on and wet some paper towels with warm water.  
Akali doesn’t move.  
“Sit.” Eve points at a stool and Akali wordlessly obeys.  
The siren sits across from her, dumping some dry paper towels on the counter beside them.  
Akali doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t move her hands from where they’re clasped behind her back.  
Eve sighs, and in a rare display of kindness, asks a question. “Can I see your hands?”  
The rogue gulps, and it’s a long moment before she brings her hands in front of her and into the light. Akali winces at the sight and shuts her eyes, but Eve doesn’t comment.  
They look as bad as they feel: encrusted with dried blood and covered in dark bruises.  
Eve moves one to rest on her thigh and gently holds the other, tenderly cleaning the blood and grime off.  
Akali keeps her eyes squeezed shut almost painfully and bites her lip to avoid making any noises of discomfort from escaping.  
Her hand gets flipped and softly dried before it’s put down and the other picked up.  
Evelynn is surprisingly gentle around her scabs, making sure to remove dried blood but not anything that’s clotting the wound.  
Akali distantly remembers how it’s weird Evelynn doesn’t have her claws on, as she rarely goes without, but she assumes it is a special situation.  
By the time Eve puts her second hand down, unwanted tears start to leak down Akali’s face.  
She slowly opens her eyes to see golden ones stare into her own, searching. Akali draws back. She doesn’t want to be read like she knows Evelynn can read her.  
She moves to stand up, but the siren holds onto her wrists. Trapped. She’s trapped.  
Of course Eve knows the second the thought crosses her mind. “I promised I’d tell them when you got home.”  
Oh.  
More tears slip down her cheeks and her face screws up in a barely successful attempt to keep a sob in.  
She nods, resigning to stay put, so Eve takes out her phone to text the two other girls.  
While they wait, the siren delicately traces her knuckles, being careful to avoid any tender spots but showing so much love that Akali finds it even harder to stop herself from breaking down.  
Evelynn looks up after a minute and eases off her stool to crack open their freezer and collect ice packs Akali didn’t know they had. It’s at this moment that Eve’s lashers finally materialize, reaching back to delicately wrap around Akali’s wrist and curl around her waist.  
It’s Eve’s way of staying with her while being across the room.  
The siren barely sits down with two ice packs wrapped in towels before Kai’sa and Ahri burst into the room.  
Ahri’s eyes are red and Kai’sa’s face is pinched in what looks like concern and distress.  
That’s enough to send Akali over the edge with a sob. She presses the palms of her protesting hands into her eyes and curls over, unable to stop the rest of the sobs from coming.  
Akali is saying something, a string of apologies, and then there’s a hand at her back, some at her hands, one at her hair, and lashers touching her waist.  
Someone hoists her up - Kai’sa - and takes her over to the couch where she’s pressed between two warm bodies and another in front of her.  
Ahri shushes her soothingly. “Let it out,” she murmurs. So Akali does.  
She sobs, brokenly and painfully, letting the hurt wash away with her tears.  
Someone cards their fingers through their hair, someone else gently keeps the ice on her hands - it feels nice - and someone else hugs her, but is careful not to smother her.  
She’s never felt so loved.  
When Akali’s tears run out, she buries her face into Ahri’s shoulder, embarrassed.  
“‘Kali,” the gumiho mumbles.  
She whimpers.  
Akali would take her hands away to rub her eyes but Eve is drawing aimless patterns across her skin again with one of the most tender touches she’s ever felt. It’s too nice to stop.  
The rogue sinks into the feeling of being cared for for a minute, breathing slowly.  
Then she struggles to prop herself up. Ahri shifts with her and Akali ends up leaning against the gumiho who’s leaning against the arm of the couch. Evelynn is perched on the couch by her hip and Kai’sa is sitting cross-legged by her feet.  
“I guess I have to talk now,” Akali grumbles.  
Ahri peers down at her with an encouraging smile. “Whenever you’re ready.”  
Akali sighs. She pulls her hands towards her and looks down, flexing her fingers. They’re stiff and they look rough, exactly like she beat up a wall and lost, but they’ll heal.  
Her mouth twists under the weight of three gazes and she wrings her hands worriedly.  
“I-“ her breath gets caught in her throat and she thinks she’s going to cry again.  
One of Eve’s lashers winds around a wrist. It’s smooth and warm and comforting.  
Akali takes a deep breath and starts from the beginning.  
All the way from her life at the Dojo and her barely-repressed anger fuelling her every move, to channeling uncomfortable emotions into physical pain to make it easier to understand, then to K/DA, where she felt at home and loved, but times still came when it was too overwhelming. She tells them how she used to pick fights on the street but she didn’t when she joined the band because she knows how bad it was, but that feeling turned inwards and she just couldn’t deal sometimes. Tears threaten to spill when she talks about her history of using her knives for bad, inflicting pain upon herself in discrete areas to make it through a day. Akali is sure to tell them it’s been many months since using one of her blades on herself and plans to never do that again, but sometimes she breaks and causes harm in other ways. “Tonight,” she says, “was weird. I guess I’d been shoving the feeling down for too long and I couldn’t take it anymore.”  
When Akali’s done she looks at the other’s reactions. Tears track down Ahri's face, the gumiho deep in thought with her fingers still playing with Akali’s hair. Evelynn looks strangely unsettled, her lashers are wrapped tighter around Akali’s wrists and she looks like she’s wrestling with her thoughts. Kai’sa is openly crying.  
“Thank you for telling us.” Eve’s eyes are filled with an intense emotion Akali isn’t used to seeing in her.  
She gives her a tight smile.  
Kai’sa pats a calf. “You’ll tell us if you feel like that again?”  
It’s a question, and Akali answers with a nod.  
She glances up at Ahri last, afraid of what the gumiho will say.  
Ahri captures her face with her hands. “I care about you so much.”  
The weight she adds to her words envelop Akali, and her throat tightens. “I care about you too,” she manages to squeeze out.  
Nothing more is said as the girls turn in for bed, choosing to all pile into Ahri’s massive bed, Akali not going without at least a body pressing against her or a lasher wrapped around her for the rest of the night.  
Maybe, with their support, she'll be ok.


End file.
